Flash Memory Enables Faster Applications and Content Access

Flash memory has become ubiquitous as could be seen at the 2014 CES and the Storage Visions Conference. At the CES mobile smartphones, tablets, watches and a bewildering variety of small mobile cameras using flash memory were everywhere. During the 2014 Storage Visions Conference Samsung VP Michael Abary gave a rundown on flash history and expected future developments. Coughlin Associates puts on the annual Storage Visions Conference, held January 5 -6, 2014 in Las Vegas.

An important factor in the growth of flash memory is increasing use of smartphones and tablets and an increasing dependency on on-line cloud services and applications using these mobile devices for everything from picture and video archiving to games and video streaming. The growth of these devices versus PCs (desktop and notebook) has been swift and dramatic. As Abary showed, smart phone unit shipments exceeded PC in 2011 and tablet PC shipments are expected to exceed all other PCs this year.

Overall NAND flash bit shipments are expected to grow about 3.4 X between 2013 and 2016. While this growth rate is driven mostly by smart phones and tablets NAND capacity shipments for SSDs that are used primarily in ultra-thin and hybrid PC are expected to increase from 16% of 2012 shipments to 26^ of total flash memory shipments in 2016.

With the decreasing price of SSD capacity more users can afford a computer using SSDs. Also if they do need more storage capacity external wired and wireless storage devices (many with 500 GB to 1 TB HDDs( are available to carry the extra files that don’t fit on the SSD. In addition SSDs are popular for mobile computers because they are more robust with regard to vibration and shock than HDDs, enable lower power modes, can boot up faster and can be considerably lighter than HDDs.

Besides consumer devices, flash memory products with PCIe as well as traditional SATA or SAS interfaces are becoming more common in enterprise applications. Information on Google upgrades show a marked increase in the application of SSDs in their data centers vs. CPU and HDD upgrades. In data centers SSDs and other flash memory products can provide consistent high level performance in terms of $/IOPs compared to HDDs.

Enterprise flash storage is also better in IOPS/GB and IOPS/Watt compared to HDDs. This has let to their extensive use for content caching and even use as primary storage for some applications, such as databases, where the entire database may be stored on flash memory for fast content access (and lower licensing costs).

As a result of the advantages for client PC as well as enterprise SSDs, Samsung expects that total capacity shipped in these devices will grow almost 4 X between 2013 and 2016. This growth is a combination of unit growth rate and the growth rate of flash product storage capacities as the cost per GB of flash memory decreases over the years.

Flash memory storage capacity is expected to continue its $/GB decline over the long term, despite the usual seasonality and the current short term tightness in NAND production vs. potential demand. This decrease in costs per storage capacity are due to decreasing lithographic line widths for the major NAND flash manufacturers, such as Toshiba, SanDisk and Hynix but Samsung has pioneered a new approach that it announced in 2013 and will ship in 2014.

Samsung is using a 3D flash cell structure with multiple flash cells embedded in a cylindrical structure in the flash wafers. These 3D flash architectures allow getting higher storage capacity while not requiring the ultra-thin lithography required with conventional planar flash memory cells. As a consequence Samsung said its 3D flash will have twice the density compared to previous 20nm-class NAND flash at 2X the write speed, 10X more endurance and 50% less power consumption.

It is clear that flash memory provides tremendous advantages for consumer devices, client computers and enterprise applications. As the price of flash capacity drops its use will become even more common and the introduction of advanced technologies such as 3D flash will enable more products to use flash memory to speed our applications and access to content, wherever it lives.